Education and the State in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.

The article focuses on the education system in Scotland during nineteenth century. The author remarks that Scotland has a special significance for West because it had a public system of education at an early stages, comparison with England, and investigation of how successfully Scottish education responded to the challenge of industrialization, therefore provide a controlled test of the hypothesis that educational progress did not depend on legislation. One line of argument is that Scotland's superiority over England was not as great as has been claimed, but the main point which West seeks to prove is that the majority of the Scottish schools, as in England, were unendowed and unsubsidized private establishments at which fees were being paid by large sections of the poor. Economic theory played practically no part in contemporary educational debates, which were notoriously dominated by questions of religion and Church-state relations. The parish schools were established by statute and financed by an assessment on land levied by the heritors, the principal landowners in each parish.